A patch of mud sucked at his boot heel. Pulling it free he kept tramping, always on the lookout for the little white scraps that would tell him he was on the right track. The wood was leafless, but still dense enough to make the going slow and noisy, twigs snapping and cracking as he made his way.

Turning slightly north, he spotted the next piece of torn paper, under a bent birch. He crossed a well-worn path and plunged back into the undergrowth. A flash of white to the right - no, it was just a cottontail. He readjusted left and picked up the trail. The bits of paper were closer together now, every 10 feet or so, as if they didn't want to make it too hard for him.

Then, so abruptly that he stopped dead for a moment, he emerged into a wide clearing, covered with dead leaves and puddles of melted snow. Ahead lay an almost continuous line of paper shreds, one every few inches, and in the center of the clearing a whole flurry of the white bits. This must be it. He ran forward...

...and woke with a gasp, the line of white still clearly imprinted on his retinas.

He sat up on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes. "Not again," he thought, "this is the fourth time in a week I've had a similar dream." He had searched his memory for a reason. The first time it was just like any other odd dream and he had put no special significance on it. But now he was sure there was something going on in his life that pressured his subconscious to hound him with these queer nightmares.

He hadn't told anyone yet.

The gray dawn was beginning to light up the room through the dingy roll up shades. He stood up and scratched his left buttocks through his thread bare, striped pajamas.

The phone on the bedside stand rang, startling him.

"Hallo" he answered through a stifled yawn.

"Clay, you're late for the ride pool. Can you make it over here in five minutes? We'll wait."

"Oh my God!" His mind tried for a second to know what day of the week it was. Finally, through the cobwebs the answer came, "It's Wednesday. My day to drive. I'm awfully sorry Pete. Can you guys go on ahead without me? I'll drive tomorrow."

After the caller had agreed and hung up, Clay's mind went back to his dream. It was still very clear, not fading like most dreams do shortly after one wakes. "Let's see, I'm searching for something. There are these markers, paper scraps. I can't always find them easily but eventually I see the next one, until ... until." He stopped reviewing the dream for a second realizing his stomach was crying out for something, coffee. "I'll think about this over some coffee".

As he walked across the living room to the kitchen a plan began to form. "Maybe I should talk to Natalie about this. She's had her own experiences with dreams and the like. That's it, I'll call in sick and go over and see Natalie." He felt better.

He knocked three times with the brass doorknocker at Natalie's apartment. As he waited for her to answer, he noticed a slip of paper at his feet. He picked it up and looked at it - it was a grocery store receipt. Six bars of soap, a bottle of V-8 juice, and a box of - he hastily stuffed the receipt into his shirt pocket as she opened the door.

Her long dark hair was newly combed and her face was freshly washed and unmadeup. She was wearing one of her inevitable peasant dresses, a languorously faded purple, and one of those primitively lacey cotton camisoles that might have been worn by her grandmother. "Hey," she said, and "Come on in."

"Want some tea?"

"Um, no, thanks," he said. "How about some V-8 juice?"

"Oh, sure" she said, and gave him a halfsmile-frown "How did you know" look askance as she went into the kitchen. While she was busy he looked around for a sitting surface that wasn't occupied by stacks of books, stacks of papers, or the shadowboxed tableaux (or their potential ingredients) that were her hobby. A laptop glowed no-nonsensically on the coffee table, columns of numbers waiting on the screen. He wedged himself in at the end of the old-quilt covered sofa and made the acquaintance of a glitter-spattered little troll doll who hung suspended by his long blue hair poked through a hole in the side of a Kenny's shoebox. The box was lined with what he hoped were xeroxed dollar bills. Natalie came back in and handed him his glass, and holding her tea mug carefully aloft whacked the laptop closed with a deft flick of her foot. She removed a couple of dictionary-sized books from a black rattan chair and sat down, peering at him inquisitively as she sipped at her tea.

"You've had recurrent dreams, haven't you?" he asked.

"I wonder if I'm having one right now" she said and smiled mischievously, and then "No, seriously, yes, but not recently. Why, have you been having one?"

He told her about the paper-chasing dream. When he got to the part about the big flurry of papers she looked expectant and then frowned with sympathetic disappointment when he said "...and then I woke up."

She reached down and picked up what looked like a fortune cookie fortune from the coffee table, looked at it a moment and wrinkled her nose, and let it flutter to the floor. "Well," she said, "I don't think a piece of paper is ever just a piece of paper."

Clay drew a book of eyeglass wipes from his shirt pocket and slowly separated a sheet from the pack. He pocketed the tissues and pulled off his glasses. "And in this case?" he said, squinting into her vicinity as he massaged a lens.

"In this case possibly a rehashing of old business. In grammar school, were you often caught short of binder paper? Had to cadge a sheet, or perhaps recycle a pathetically used one, having ironed out the wrinkles as best you could by drawing the stretched sheet across your desk edge? Or how about toilet paper? Lived in fear, perhaps, as a small child, of being caught dirty on the pot with only one or two sheets left to the roll?"

"I think if it were one of those things, I'd have had the dreams before this. Anyway, I have plenty of binder paper now, and piles of newspapers in the john." He settled his hornrims back on his nose and lifted his V-8 glass from among the litter of sticky notes, news clippings and three-by-five cards on Natalie's coffee table.

"Good point. Those are solved problems. We need something new in your life." Natalie pulled a dog-eared steno pad from the clutter before her and tested a ballpoint on it with a quick scribbling motion. She looked up. "What's new, Clay?"

Clay gulped, clearing a mouthful of V-8. "Your necklace, in fact".

She looked down quizzically and fingered the string of dark lacquered lozenges at her throat.

"It's paper, isn't it?" he said. They're rolled-up strips, then painted."

"Yes, I think so..." she said slowly, then, as if explanation were necessary, "Sandy, at work, made it."

"She doesn't seem the craftsy type."

"You know her?"

"We use the same laundromat. I'll have to remember to mention this when I see her," he said, extending a hand to touch it himself. "It's a nice piece."

Natalie leaned back out of reach and whined wearily, "I'm so poor at extemporaneous fictions."

Clay stared disbelievingly at the dainty chrome-plated automatic she now levelled at his beltline.

Before his eyes, the room sort of swirled, then rolled itself up like one of Natalie’s paper beads. Clay felt no pain, no jolt of a gunshot, no anger. It seemed to him that he was floating or flying up, out of her picture window and over the apartment rooftops. If he tilted right, he moved right, if he tilted left, he moved left. So away he floated and soon he found himself over his office building.

With a little effort, he passed through the ceiling and there laid out before him was the maze of cubicles. He could see his own tidy desk, with his landscape snapshots pinned to the padded wall. He saw the inbox with new paperwork that he had to do tomorrow. He saw that he had forgotton to turn off his printer.

Then his eyes wandered. A dull looking party was underway in section 4-E with confetti strewn about and the usual store-bought cookies. And there was Mr. Porter’s office and, as everyone suspected, Cecilia from personnel was in there with him. Nice bra, Clay thought dreamily. Pete was surfing the internet, Ron was working on one of his stories for his web writers ring, and amazingly, Debbie was actually working on her report that was due Friday.

But as he hovered there, watching them, Clay realized that he didn’t care about anything here. All of this and all his hard work locked, intangible, in a plastic humming box on a prefab desk. For what? This was not the real world, at all. Look at the overflowing recycle boxes, the overheating office shredder, the printers in every cubicle pushing forth reams worth of paper, paper, paper. And as he watched, it seemed to start snowing.

Snow, Clay mused, was something from the real world. But this snow, he now saw, was made of thousands of scraps of paper flittering downward until it blocked his view.

As Clay reached up to brush the falling bits from his face, he was startled by the very real sensation of his own hand making clumsy contact with his cheek - warm and wet. Ugh, drool, thought Clay, feeling slightly embarrassed even if no one was there to notice.

His surroundings now slowly intruded upon his detached state of mind... the warm wood- grain surface beneath his head, the sound of the clock ticking, the feel of the paper snow falling on his still-closed eyes. Paper snow... funny how it was still falling here in the real world... paper snow? The question resolved itself into the crystalline conflict of accepted fact verses illusionary concept. Eyelids fluttering against the still falling flakes, Clay became aware of a familiar sound -- the crinkle and swish of paper. "Olive! Get down from there!" Clay shouted suddenly, pulling fully awake with an abruptness that startled the tortoise-shell even more than the rebuke. She recovered with the customary coolness of most felines, refusing to admit she had been caught off- guard in a verboten activity. Deftly dropping off the shelf above Clay’s head, she gave a mischievous flick of her tail as she rounded the corner.

The mantle clock began chiming. "O’mgosh! It’s almost nine!" Quickly picking up the scraps littering the desktop and worn pine floor, he sighed at the futility of it all... a 2 x 6 inch piece of justification, a 3 x 10 inch list of pardons... scraps of wood pulp redeeming his hard-earned income from the IRS.

"Death and taxes..." Clay muttered, "it’s a good thing this Natalie’s only after the second."

Shrugging on his rumpled tweed jacket, he cradled the shoe box of gathered receipts under his left arm. Fishing out a crisp business card from his right hand pocket, he scanned it as he stepped through the front door; Natalie Portman, Auditor -- Internal Revenue Service, 726 Main.